


the stars above us (govern our conditions)

by Fulgaraverde



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-27
Updated: 2012-05-27
Packaged: 2017-11-06 03:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/414211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fulgaraverde/pseuds/Fulgaraverde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the same night in two realms, Jane and Sif look up, and wonder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the stars above us (govern our conditions)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Challenge #4, the Leading Ladies prompt, at LJ's Avengersland. I am attempting to get my shit together early, and archive all of the things I produce properly before I lose track of them all.

The stars are brighter here.

It is one of the few things about Norway that Jane likes.  The stars hang beautifully in the sky, diamond-bright and knife-sharp, like they’re closer, somehow.

The roof of the observatory is technically off-limits, but it never stops Jane, and she thinks even if she’s caught they won’t tell her to stop. She doesn’t know what the others have been told about her, and whatever it is, Jane doubts it’s even a tenth of the truth, but they all _know,_ somehow.

“Alfheim, Jötunheim, Vanaheim, Nidavellir.” She recites them quietly, these names he taught her, as if the words might disappear into the night if she lets them. “Svartelheim, Hel, Muspelheim, Midgard, Asgard.”

Jane’s done the math on it and she’s fairly certain it isn’t possible to see one realm from another, but it doesn’t stop her imagination. There’s a brown dwarf they’ve just discovered here, colder than any other they’ve seen before, and it makes her think of Jötunheim before she can stop herself.

It isn’t visible from here, that one - it’s far too faint; there’s another, though, a huge bright thing hundreds of times bigger than the sun. She finds it without much trouble; she knows its position well enough by now, alone in its own little piece of sky. Even now it seems a little yellower than the others. Her boss here thinks it could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of planets around it, soaking up all that light, but Jane has another theory she likes better.

She smiles up at the bowl of the sky and thinks, _Asgard._

\---

Sif has no time for stars.

She did, once, as a child, when they would stand at the edges of the Bifrost and look out into the vast space below, and Thor would retell the stories the Allfather had told him. Loki would spend his time explaining how Yggdrasil was a tree, and yet not a tree, and as usual most of it went over all of their heads.

Sif had fallen in love a little with each day they spent there, some days with Thor, some days with Loki and some days, with the stars that surrounded them.  
  
“Can you see them from here? The other realms?” Sif had asked once, and Thor had shrugged.

“Surely you must,” Fandral had asserted, with his typical confidence, and leaned out a little further than usual. “Let us see. That one looks like Vanaheim, doesn’t it?”

“That isn’t how it works,” Loki had told him, and Fandral’s smile had disappeared as fast as smoke in the wind.

Fandral had almost fallen from the path, not that day but another soon after, and he refused to go there after that, so none of them did.

She looks up sometimes now, on those clear, cool nights that Asgard is so good at, when the sky is so painfully bright, and for half a second she smiles, before she remembers how things have changed.

Sif the warrior is not the same as Sif the child, and there is no longer time for stars.


End file.
